Marilyn Maye
When the cabaret singer Marilyn Maye turned ninety, in April of last year, she celebrated with a seven-night stint at Feinstein’s/54 Below, which she titled “90 At Last!” For her ninety-first birthday, she returned with another set of standards, called “I Wish I Were 90 Again!” Maye is a last-of-her-kind crooner who can still mesmerize an audience; she interprets the Great American Songbook with an unfussy warmth that feels transported from a less ironic age. “I’m a little different animal than a lot of performers,” she said the other day. “I sing to you, not for you.”
The secret of her stamina, she said, is vitamins, which her assistant of thirty years lays out for her. “She may be killing me off slowly, because I don’t know what they are,” Maye said with a laugh. Also, she never stops working. She holds the record for most appearances by a singer on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”—seventy-six—and has played the same lake resort in Iowa for sixty-three summers straight. In 2005, after years of living and working in the Midwest, she returned to New York to sing at a Jerry Herman tribute (“I was triumphant, I have to say”), which led to steady, jam-packed gigs at the Metropolitan Room and a new audience that had somehow missed her first eight decades.
Maye now rents an apartment in Manhattan and has performances scheduled through February. “It’s kind of scary to book ahead,” she admitted. Between appearances, she teaches master classes. On a recent afternoon, Maye and a dozen aspiring chanteuses were in a midtown rehearsal room, with a grand piano and a microphone. Learning to sell a jazz standard is a bit like studying Yiddish or letterpress, but singers swear by Maye’s workshops; Jon Batiste, the thirty-two-year-old bandleader of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” is among the musicians who have audited. (Maye: “He’s cute as the dickens.” Batiste: “She’s the real deal, man.”) One woman, a psychoanalyst, was attending the class, she said, because “I live in the world of emotions and people’s self-conscious dynamics, and the voice is the medium through which we often connect our inner and our outer experience.”
Maye sat at a table, hunched over sheet music, wearing thick glasses, a white cardigan, and bright-pink lipstick. A young woman named Emma K. Campbell sang the 1946 ballad “Tenderly,” as Maye made notes with a red pencil. “I want to hear your breath in the line,” she instructed, when Campbell sang the arpeggioed word “breathlessly.”
Next, a blond woman who works in publishing and moonlights as a jazz singer apologized for having a mysterious rash on her arm. “Don’t think about it,” Maye advised. “You got a show to do, you do it.” She tapped a high-heeled foot as the woman sang a swinging rendition of “Cheek to Cheek.” Maye told her to look at someone in the audience when she sang the line “Dance with me.”
Maye’s career started at the age of nine, when she won an amateur singing contest in Topeka; the prize was a thirteen-week radio spot. In her teens, she hosted her own show on KRNT, in Des Moines, called “Marilyn Entertains.” Steve Allen caught her in a club in Kansas City, which led to television spots and, in 1965, a record deal with RCA. “That’s the good part,” Maye recalled. “The bad part is I was late. Had this happened in the forties, I think I would be more of a household name.” But Carson kept booking her through the rock-and-roll revolution. “He would usually pop into the makeup room and say, ‘You going to do “Here’s That Rainy Day”?’ And I would say, ‘Johnny, I’ve done it three times!’ He’d say, ‘Well, that’s all right. Do it again!’” Her contemporaries included Ella Fitzgerald, who called Maye her favorite white-girl singer. “Most of our conversations took place in dressing rooms,” Maye recalled. “She’d always ask me if I liked her new wigs.”
At the master class, Maye watched Susie Clausen, a real-estate agent from California who entertains at retirement homes, perform the standard “How About You?,” accompanying herself on saxophone. “Her name is going to be Saxy Susie,” Maye announced. Mid-song, Clausen lost her place and glanced at the accompanist. “Don’t look at the pianist,” Maye said. “It shows insecurity.”
At the end of the class, Maye stood up and shared an ancient saying: If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught. The piano started, and Maye launched into the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune “Getting to Know You,” singing in a soothing near-whisper. When she got to the line “Getting to feel free and easy,” she stopped herself. “It isn’t ‘Getting-to-feel-free-and-easy,’” she instructed. “No. ‘Getting to feel free’”—inhale—“‘and easy.’ See, there are two thoughts there: free and easy.”♦
